2010 Projects and the Future

July 31, 2010

It might be obvious that I haven’t made any progress since my last entry.  The problem has been that my attention is scattered.  I do not think this is necessarily a bad thing, in that I have not really been idle, but have made progress (however limited) on many projects—no less than seven in total.

I think I made the most textual progress on Death and Life and Samantha, which I have discussed in this journal.  But I also made some progress with a stage play titled (for now), “What do you want?”  In fact, at my wife’s advising, I took a single scene out of that play and tried to strengthen it as a stand-alone ten-minute play, which is easier to get produced, and for which format there are numerous contests.

Additionally, I did some planning and a little bit of writing on a few other novels: The Death of Aaron Jamison, which is an expansion of a short story I wrote in 1998, itself only a sketch of an intended longer work; The Assassination of Prince Rolin en Qarriel, which was intended to be a light and easy work just to give me a bit of freedom—I started writing it because I was annoyed with my more “literary” ambitions and decided to write something purely plot-driven, based on all the tired tropes of pop literature—and instead, it has turned into an attempt at writing a Greek-styled tragedy.

Between the Stars I worked on just a little bit, but the story hasn’t come together for me quite yet.  But also this summer an old story I’ve been thinking about for several years got a new bit of inspiration—working title, Immortality—and I wrote just a little bit of that and have a rough framework developed.  A new story occurred to me, about a serial killer, but it needs something more, a second piece that eludes me.  I sketched a bit of it and wrote a bare introductory chapter, but got no further.

And last, I did quite a bit of work on an essay titled “A Philosophy for Writing Fiction,” which was a response to my experiences on the website “Authonomy.”  I will probably continue to touch up that essay for the next few years, and at some point I will post it on my website.

In the meantime, I am about to start grad school.  So my current project is now Graduate School, and it is also my primary focus.  I do not expect to write very much fiction while I am enrolled.  I want to give school as much focus as I can, and to that end, I will not work on fiction with any regularity.  Obviously inspiration in such a fecund environment as academia will be ongoing, and once in a while I will probably touch a project or two.  I will update this space.

Filed under Life, Writing.

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